Sales outsourcing should be a part of every sales leader’s playbook. Companies can attract high volumes of customers for their products or services using a third-party sales agency. In this article, we explore how to grow revenue by outsourcing a portion of your sales efforts. When done correctly, outsourcing can quickly ramp up your growth.
What’s Inside:
- Sales outsourcing and market insights
- What 2021 sales plan needs can an outsourced sales team satisfy?
- Trends driving the need for sales outsourcing
- Objectives of sales outsourcing projects
- How to evaluate the financial return of outsourcing sales function
- How Inside Sales Solutions can help
Sales outsourcing and market insights
When people think of outsourcing, they often think of low-value off-shoring services. Many don’t consider it as a possible core function of their sales strategy. Outsourcing is an acquired capability and it can be difficult at first to find a partner you can trust. But the right outsourced sales partner can be a major value-add. Once you do find the right partner, using a third-party for all or part of your sales development function can work well in almost any market.
The right partner will examine the market thoroughly. They can provide detailed feedback about how your product or service fits, whether there’s a dominant competitor, what pains potential buyers are experiencing, and any existing solutions they’re using. If necessary, they’ll help you use these insights to realign your value proposition to the market conditions and your ideal customer profile.
Knowing these insights and realigning to capitalize on them will help you better position your solution to generate more revenue. The best sales development provider for you will already have extensive experience in your industry, compounding the value they can provide.
What 2021 sales plan needs can an outsourced sales team satisfy?
Beyond market insights, bringing in a sales development team can have substantial benefits for your organization. Some of those benefits include:
1. Speed to Market
Whether you want to drive a new product to market, reactivate a group of dormant customers, or you’ve just received an influx of capital for sales growth, the right sales partner can launch an outbound sales development campaign in as little as a couple of days.
2. Scaling a Workforce
Outsourcing sales can help a company scale a workforce up or down quickly without the risk and ramp-up time it takes to do so with only internal resources. It gives leadership teams options that they may not have had prior to considering outsourcing.
3. Flexibility
If you’re pursuing a new market or product offering, dealing with a lot of legacy issues related to personnel and human capital can slow down your time to market. Outsourcing’s inherent flexibility enables companies to pilot new approaches and execute quickly.
4. Focus
When we talk to sales leaders, one of the biggest challenges is getting the team to focus on new initiatives. And it’s no wonder why. On average, salespeople have 20-30 things they are responsible for each day. Plus, sales agents often can’t transition as quickly as you think they can. For them, it’s a totally new way to think. But with the right outsource partner, you can work with a team that’s insulated from corporate noise and experienced with a rapid pace of change.
5. Capability
When you team up with the right partner, you get access to systems, tools, technologies, and processes. A good partner is going to have a suite of sales enablement technology that is pre-built, optimized for performance, and ready to go in days and weeks, not months and years.
6. Attractive Financial Return
While working with a sales development partner does have upfront costs, these must be balanced against the revenue and return they can provide. They must also be compared against the full costs associated with managing an internal team, especially the opportunity costs associated with increased ramp-up time, inexperience, or immature sales enablement. When these full costs are taken into account, outsourcing is often a cost-attractive option that generates a great return.
Trends driving the need for sales outsourcing
Several shifts in the marketplace have triggered an accelerated rate of adoption for outsourced sales resources, making it a more viable option today than ever before. So what’s causing more and more companies to outsource a portion of their sales function?
Brand /Customer Experience
How prospects are getting information has changed. Customer experience (CX) is the new sales and marketing. The right sales development partner will help with seamless customer transition from marketing, to your sales process, to contract renewals and ensure that an ideal brand experience is represented.
Technology
It seems that there’s a new software tool for sales coming out each day. Expert sales development teams that live in this industry can help filter through the noise and leverage the tools they truly need. From a CRM to sales enablement tech, a good partner will know exactly which tool is right for you and your goals. If you’re already happy with your tech stack, their breadth in experience also allows them to jump into your existing tools and processes with ease.
Talent
Finding great sales talent is no easy task. Retaining great sales talent can be even more difficult. Sales development service providers take on that burden to provide a more reliable workforce and significant time and resource savings for internal sales and marketing leaders.
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Objectives of sales outsourcing projects
Overall company goals we often talk about center around revenue and profit. It’s then sales leaders’ job to translate the high-level revenue goals into smaller, more specific sales execution goals.
However, while hitting sales quotas is important, there are two other metrics that have a far greater impact on overall company success:
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
When evaluating a third-party sales company, be sure that they’re focused on creating an experience that will effectively maximize LTV and minimize CAC.
Lastly, there’s a third, softer objective that’s equally important: creating the right brand experience for the customer. The right partner can help you maintain or improve the experience you’re providing to B2B customers and prospects. This ensures that they’re comfortable with and attracted to the company’s brand.
How to evaluate the financial return of outsourcing sales function
If you’ve read this far, you might be wondering how a sales leader can decide if outsourcing a part of their sales team is right for them and estimate the revenue opportunity it could provide. We recommend approaching that calculation in one or both of the following ways:
- Evaluate your current customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV). Then, consider how an outsourced sales team can affect those metrics. Estimate the impact of a clear cost per appointment, improved lead quality, reduced sales cycles, and quicker go-to-market execution.
- The second way to evaluate the potential return is to estimate the opportunity cost. What revenue might you be missing out on if you have to hire your own team, set up your own tech stack, or optimize a function that’s not meeting expectations? What additional revenue could you generate if you could spend your day on more productive activities?
How Inside Sales Solutions can help
Inside Sales Solutions helps high-tech B2B companies drive revenue faster with less risk. We offer flexible sales development services, delivered by an experienced team of tech-sales experts. As a true partner in our clients’ growth, we offer a variety of customized, high-end sales solutions.
Appointment Setting
Get qualified appointments with senior decision-makers for your direct and channel sales teams – paying per appointment to help ensure an attractive return on investment.
Qualifying Leads
Turn more of your MQLs into SQLs to maximize your return on marketing spend and ensure that your internal sales reps are only focused on high-quality leads.
Dedicated Sales Development
Our employees become yours, without the overhead. Get sales experts dedicated full-time to the sales activities you need executed to reach your goals. This could include anything from cold calling to working a trade show to executing an ABM strategy and more.
Event Success
Drive attendance to your events through outbound calling and generate more closed deals with high-quality, post-event followup.
Database Services
A robust honeypot of leads, opportunities, and new lists based on your ideal customer profile (ICP).
“Everything from the way that they support our team to the reporting to the billing is done with our satisfaction in mind. We hae use many different companies in the past but now I go for Inside Sales Solutions every time. The main reason: we win buisness from their leads.”
-VP of Marketing, Evolven
Inside Sales Solutions Frequently Asked Questions
If I partner with Inside Sales Solutions, who provides the leads?
Who provides the leads for our efforts depends on the business challenge that we are tasked at solving. Which part of the customer engagement life-cycle do you need to see improved results in?
If our goal is to generate net-new accounts, Inside Sales Solutions works with a proprietary database to perform outbound activities and leverage data that you may not otherwise have access to.
If our goal is to ensure that you’re making the most of dormant leads or leads collected through your own marketing strategies, we work from specific target lists you provide.
How is reporting done?
As part of our onboarding process, you’re granted 24/7 access to a proprietary Customer Success Portal. This portal allows you to view all of your active and past campaign performance in a very focused way. You’ll get better visibility into each activity we’re engaged in, as well as any hiccups with your internal processes.
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